


Dreams

by am_fae



Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword - Henryk Sienkiewicz, Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: (Only Not), Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Westworld Fusion, Canon Universe, F/M, Pre-OT3, i have never watched an episode of westworld in my life, mentions of rape??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 19:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16816873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/am_fae/pseuds/am_fae
Summary: The Kiev loop was meant to be a sort of Easter egg in the game. Do this, and this, and this in the right order, and you could get that scene: the candles glowing in the golden domes of the cathedral, and Bohun’s grim face alight.(set in an OiM Westworld-esque AU that is mainly tuulikki/LucyLovecraft's)





	Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> All I and also you need to know about Westworld for the purposes of this AU is that Jan/Helena/Bohun/most other characters are robot "hosts" in a theme park designed to mimic 1600s Ukraine/PLC, which belongs to (human) business mogul Jeremi. Zagłoba plays an important role in designing & managing the park. The robots don't know they're robots and believe they're living human lives in the Commonwealth in the 1600s. They're programmed not to remember previous cycles of the park/game.

The Kiev loop was meant to be a sort of Easter egg in the game. Do this, and this, and this in the right order, and you could get that scene: the candles glowing in the golden domes of the cathedral, and Bohun’s grim face alight.

It was tricky. Even in the early years of the park, Helena had already become one of the hardest hosts to effectively romance. It took a while to win her trust, for the guests who cared about that sort of thing.

She always fell into Jan’s arms the moment pretty boy appeared on the scene, but Bohun… Well, Zagłoba’d muse in the lab, zooming in on the cameras and regretting the near-human pain in the girl’s dark eyes, she had been programmed to already remember the Cossack with fear.

_And perhaps there had been too many arcs where Bohun had brought her harm._

_The boss wouldn’t like to hear that particular theory._ Zagłoba could imagine Wiśniowiecki’s response already: That’s called a glitch, Zagłoba. Don’t you remember why the guests come back? It’s brand new. Every time.

_Anyway_. Helena was distrustful, and Bohun wasn’t wont to force her. But the Kiev wedding was, technically, possible.

_Helena takes his hand, and Jurko thinks he might cry. In the distance, the priest pronounces a prayer of cleansing, his chanting far more familiar than Latin, faintly understood. But Helena Kurcewiczówna’s long black hair is brushed over her shoulders, and she stands so close that Bohun can feel the subtle warmth of her like the glow from a fire, and he isn’t paying the slightest attention as the priest asks God to purify the young couple and protect them from sin, from the works of the devil._

_When they step into the nave, Bohun’s nearly blinded by the radiance of the image: a thousand – no, ten thousand – wax candles, rendering the dome’s interior as golden as its lofty cupolas beneath the sky, lighting saints and angels and a thousand other images on the arching walls._

_But when Cossack ataman and young bride turn towards each other, Jurko has no eyes for anything but the young woman whose hand the priest fastens to his, and – and she for him. Helena’s shining eyes, dark as onyx, reflect the million little lights above as she smiles up at him, her breath warm, the gown’s blossom-colored silk falling over her slender body like water._

_I need no salvation, Bohun thinks as the priest chants and Helena intertwines their fingers. There can be no greater Heaven than this._

_Helena sings with the congregation even when the two of them are meant (are they? Bohun doesn’t know and certainly couldn’t care less) to stay silent, once she picks up the words, and answers anything expected of her in Ruthenian._

_It takes him a long moment to realize he’s meant to kiss the cross, and when both have done so, Bohun doesn’t wait for the priest’s command to sweep his beloved into his arms, free hand at her waist._

_Helena’s eyes are open and watching, waiting to trust, and Jurko, breath catching, kisses her as gently as he knows how. She sighs a little and the dark eyes slip closed._

_[…]_

_Bohun lays Helena down on a bed of silken sheets and touches her as gently as if she were a bird held in his hands._

_Once – once he’d had a dream where –_

Helena beneath a canopy hung with cloth-of-gold, a wild thing caught in a trap.

In the dream, she’d clutched the covers to herself like a shield, shrinking away into the rich pillows as he stepped nearer, even as her eyes flashed pride and pain –

_It was a nightmare, nothing more._

_He caresses Helena’s smooth shoulders, unfastens the pearl-embroidered bodice over that long shift of petal-silk beneath which her warm skin moves and rises..._

_“_ Jurko _,” Helena sighs, and tilts her head back, smiling shy and daring, to capture a kiss. Then, emboldened, she tangles her hands in his hair and pulls him down for another, and Bohun feels as though between their bodies a flame has crackled to life._

_[…]_

_Once Bohun’d dreamt –_

Someone whose face he couldn’t remember was holding him down, keeping him pinned so he couldn’t move. There was a burning pain in his side and he tasted blood. The familiar stars of the steppe shone distantly overhead, intermingled with the smoke of their campfire.

Someone laughed, and starlight flashed off a sabre’s edge. “You really are the prettiest…”

His accent was strange. Bohun’d strained to remember the words.

In the dream, he’d known already, somehow, that he’d been there before. Bohun fought and bit and cursed. He struggled to crawl away from rough voices and rougher hands while blood slipped from his skin into the dry grass. It had done no good.

_He’d decided that if he had ever been so – used – it must have been when he was far younger. When he was weak and alone. Those days had been hard, and he could barely remember them. If it were at all real, it must have been then, because that could never happen now._

_No, it couldn’t._

_And after the wedding night, when they lay together, safe and warm entwined in a bed strewn with the rich fruits of his raids and expeditions – all to keep Helena in safety and warmth and adornment, that she might never know want – Jurko Bohun held his love cradled in his arms, and bent his head to kiss the pale curve of her throat. “It’s never been like that for me,” he told her hoarsely, and it was the truth._

You see, the problem was it started to get too easy for the Cossack to win Helena’s love. Bohun was supposed to be a villain. (An _antagonist,_ in Wiśniowiecki’s crisp diction.)

Even the arcs where players went for the Commonwealth side and/or Jan married Helena began to be… uncertain.

Zagłoba grins at the footage from the park for the current loop, five reruns after the Kiev wedding: the beautiful orphan of the Ukraine, for the first time refusing Jan’s proposal.

“You’ve been so kind to me, panie,” she says, and takes his hand. “It – it would be a lie to say I don’t love you for it. But there is another I love more.”

Jan’s brows crease. “The Cossack?”

_Just the right edge of contempt in the boy’s voice_. Zagłoba mentally congratulates himself for having made a couple alterations – as minor as the boss would allow, of course. Wiśniowiecki is… particular about his pet project.

Helena raises her chin, standing tall. “Yes.”

Jan raises the hand he holds to his lips and kisses the knuckles, head bowed.

“Kurcewiczówna,” he says the first time this arc, “I would do anything to serve you.” The amber eyes are warm. “My heart is yours. You don’t have to love me in return.” Zagłoba’s mouth twitches. Jan’s programmed for _that_ , that’s for sure. “If… if you ever want me – if you need my help – send word, love, and I’ll come for you.” Jan’s giving Helena the earnest under-the-eyelashes look he gives every player who expresses the slightest interest, but for once Zagłoba doesn’t roll his eyes in response. This time, it makes his breath catch. The hussar clasps her hand in both his own a moment before turning and mounting his horse: “Your happiness is my deepest desire. I beg you, keep well.”

At Zagłoba’s side, Wiśniowiecki reaches out to pause the video. His eyes are very cold.

“They’re developing,” Zagłoba says, not even trying to keep the excitement from his voice.

He already knows what he’s about to hear: _It’s a glitch._

“It’s a glitch,” Wiśniowiecki says.

_No surprises there._

“This is the beginning of the loop,” Wiśniowiecki says. “Helena is afraid of Bohun. Falls in love with Jan barring player intervention. That is the _setup_. Then the game continues. Fix it, or I will.”

In the labs, they add constraints. Play with Bohun’s stats until he’s a cocktail of instability and pain and violent rage, a roiling abyss of hungry need.

Zagłoba, usually the one to complain about character continuity – _he’s not supposed to actually_ act _like a robot, “Your Highness” –_ can’t deny that it fits. The host is still recognizably _Bohun._

For some reason, the knowledge doesn’t alleviate the unease in his stomach.

For her part, Helena gains clear memories of what Bohun’d “done” before the loop: the gleam of a blade and a man’s head splitting, blood pooling in the dirt, seeping across the yard of Rozłogi. It’s easy enough to scare her with the footage from a previous arc, but when Zagłoba turns her on to check if it worked, the host’s barely-disguised flinch when he asks what happened pulls at him.

This time Jan isn’t with the other hosts in storage. But he’s returned before the start of the next loop, as good as new.

_Jurko’s returning to Rozłogi after a summer of raids when he sees the little convoy – the Kniahini, and her sons. It’s a little grudging, but affection rises in his chest._

>The only family I’ve ever known.

_When he’s greeted them, he turns and – a young lach officer is watching him with eyes that widen and then narrow._

_Bohun starts._

>Jan.

_Bohun shakes his head to clear it. He’s never seen the officer before. Red kontusz, the Prince’s colors… dark hair that gleams golden in the light of the setting sun, dark eyes that flash like bright steel._

_When Bohun sees the carriage, half-obscured in the shadow of the wooded road, his breath stops, as if all his soul is reaching out towards the slim, tall form he sees there._

>Helena – Helena, my soul, my cuckoo, my own heart.

_Helena Kurcewiczówna looks at him with fear and hatred before turning sharply away, and Bohun feels something inside him snap._

_[…]_

_In Czehryń, Bohun drinks to drown his sorrows._

_The Kniahini promised Helena to him. Helena is_ his. _She just… surely if he gives her time to get used to the idea it’s a bountiful generosity! Surely in the end she…_

_“We’re to be married,” he tells someone he doesn’t recognize, setting his lute to the side almost carelessly, grinning a smile so bitter and sharp he chokes on it. Jurko washes the smile down with more gorzałka. Loses himself in reverie._

_Once, Bohun’d had a dream that –_

Helena in a blossom-colored gown that echoed the roses in her cheeks. There were flickering candles all about, blurring their surroundings, but he could make out the gold-leaf halos of icons, of angels, on the high walls. Bohun doesn’t know how he’s sure, but he knows in the dream they stood in the cathedral in holy Kiev.

Somewhere, a choir was singing, and a priest was praying in a familiar tongue. Asking God to purify the young couple and protect them from the works of the devil.

Helena smiled up at him. Her black eyes shone, reflecting the golden light.

As he leaned in to kiss her, Helena squeezed his hand and did not pull away. When he slid his free arm about her waist, she relaxed into the touch as if it were familiar. Before their lips met and his love’s eyes slipped closed, Helena looked at him with a sort of open, quivering trust, and she had never been more brave, and he had never loved her more.

_The first time Bohun dreamt it he woke to tears._

_[…]_

_Much later, Jurko spits at the stranger he’d met in the Czehryń tavern._

_“I would ask you to the wedding,” he sneers, “but it won’t be today or tomorrow. There’s war at present. And… you are getting on in years, aren’t you, panie?” He grins like a madman. “Perhaps you will not live to see it.”_

From the safety of the labs, Zagłoba laughs. Bohun’s dialogue improvisation program is his favorite – he had a hand in it himself.

It’s too bad Bohun doesn’t know that guests can’t be harmed by the park hosts, no matter how cruel they may be. It’s impossible. But, he muses – rather poetically, too – was not Bohun’s very character programmed to defy the impossible – to rail against the gods? He settles back in his chair, chuckling. The guest is safe.

_The stranger smiles. Bohun could almost admire his courage._

_“The wedding? Really?” The stranger’s laugh is eerily comradely. “As if you care about that kind of thing.”_

_“What do you think I am, some kind of peasant, to constrain her without a priest?” Bohun shakes his head. “I’m an ataman! A hetman! You think I won’t get married in Kiev, with fifty nuns singing in the choir and a hundred deacons behind the best beeswax candles?”_

_The now-cherished image flashes over his vision. Helena in the candlelight, smiling. The singing that welled around them to fill the dome._

_If he can just – if he just can create that scene, she will smile at him, and lean into his touch, and there will be no more perfect happiness on this earth._

_[…]_

_Horpyna looks into the water wheel, glistening white in the winter sun. She calls up: “Cheremis, shut the sluice!”_

_“I dream that I’m marrying her,” Bohun says, low and fervent, his eyes fixed on the space where the water had fallen._

_“Ey, falcon,” the witch laughs, still shaky from her prophesying, “I said you’re no kind of Cossack at all.”_

_“We’re in Kiev,” Bohun says, so fixated on the image he again sees pass over his eyes that he pays her no heed. “There’s so much candlelight the whole church shines like high noon. She’s smiling. If I just…” His reflection is blurred by ripples, settles, perfect and crisp-edged. “I know if she’s there all will be as I dreamt it. I_ know it _.”_

_Bohun slashes his hand through the icy water of the millpond, breaking the spell._

_Horpyna settles next to him, an easy, careless slant to her hips, green eyes alight. Then something changes in her, so slight Bohun doesn’t notice. She stiffens. “Sometimes we dream of the things we want.”_

_Bohun disguises his shudder with a smile that tugs bitterly at the corner of his mouth._

_“Not me,” he says._

**Author's Note:**

> The line "Bohun lays Helena down on a bed of silken sheets and touches her as gently as if she were a bird held in his hands" is entirely tuulikki/LucyLovecraft's phrasing and she deserves all credit for it!
> 
> The bit where Bohun's talking to the park guest about the wedding is remixed from Kuniczak's OiM translation.
> 
> this needs editing but for once, any historical inaccuracy can be blamed on Jeremi :)


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